Friday, September 11, 2015

In the spring, the Greg and I signed Evan up for Preschool for the fall, but had reservations the whole time. It was four days a week for 3 hours each day and 100/month. I have no doubt that he would have loved it, but honestly, I don't want him under anyone else's influence until he has to be (if we decide to not homeschool, which I just don't know if I'm cut out for) and I think paying money for something I can do is so dumb. So, I'm going to try and blog weekly about our homeschooling because eventually I want to get my blog made into a book and I want to have this in it! So far, we have had so much fun! Have a little sneak peak...

We work together 3 days of the week and we always start with prayer, calendar, Pledge of Allegiance, and we work on telling time.

This week we focused a lot on apples because it's fall and a fun fall thing to do is visit an apple orchard. So, I'm taking him to Lynd's fruit farm for a little field trip sometime after the baby comes (or maybe before if the wee one is late). After we read some books and sang some songs we moved on to fun hands on things.

Evan LOVES to use scissors, so he cut out a bunch of things for our activities

We read some books about how Apple Tree's grow, what happens to them during all the seasons, and how Apples grow from a flower on the tree (which is pretty cool, actually!) Then we talked about the parts of an apple and he was able to glue all the parts together. We used the apple tree he cut out to drop buttons (apples) on. He would try to predict how many buttons he could get on the tree when he dropped them and then after he would count them all and see if he was right. Such a fun counting game! He could have done that forever.

We moved on to some fine motor things. He used a q-tip, dipped it in paint, and filled in the dots to paint the numbers. Then he practiced writing his letters by writing words.

Day 2

We have some great people in our neighborhood that homeschool all of their kids and they were kind enough to invite us to their messy art day.

Then we came home and did sight word Hopscotch (thank you husband for writing the words so I didn't have to bend over my giant uterus!) I called out a word and he had to jump to it. He loved this one as well--a nice gross motor activity.

I made a tree with numbers and cut out some leaves numbered 1-20 and he just had to match up the numbers. Just a simple number recognition activity. The tree we dropped buttons on yesterday we used to glue the buttons onto today. It was more of a "I don't really know what to do with this, so just glue them on" but Evan actually made a little lesson out of it himself. He lined all the buttons up and as he glued them down he would count them all and say, "I have 24 more until I'm all done." Well done child.

I had him write Apple Tree today to get some writing practice in. We also read more books and then called it a day.

Day 3

I had a baby! So we took some time off.

Day 4

It's been pretty low key lately and totally not according to my lesson plans I made through the spring/summer. I'm just really jumping around, but we're getting it all in, so it works.

This was some candy corn math. He counted out the candy corn according to the number Ihad written and then we practiced adding and subtracting from that number.

Then we worked on some fine motor skills and literacy things. We stuffed the apple after he got the majority of it laced. He was so proud of this apple we had to hang it on his wall haha.

I printed off this little book and he read each page and colored it according to what the book said. I was impressed he didn't need help reading any of the colors

Day 5

A little STEM activity. He tried to build these pumpkins as tall as he could.

Pumpkin patch number match. For number recognition....I drew numbers 10-30 and he had to put the candy pumpkin on top of the number.

I made apples with uppercase letters on them and clothespins with lowercase letters and he matched them up. Then he put all the letters in order.

More writing

Day 6
He collected sticks and then he arranged them in order for tallest to shortest

Practicing patterns. I printed this off, he cuts out the animals and finishes each pattern.